There the players work on pieces to be performed in the same room the same evening.
The first couple of days of the six-day festival, Tuesday June 2 and today, Wednesday the 3rd, there are open rehearsals starting at noon in the concert hall of community center Zaal 100. Four years later, I was living in Amsterdam and writing a book about improvised music here.
This is my kind of festival that combination of ad hoc groups and big anchor pieces recalls for me the Bimhuis’s 1991 October Meeting-the first place I saw many of the Dutch masters in person. Ten musicians from the US (including Tri-Centric founder, saxophonist, official Jazz Master and classical composer Anthony Braxton) and ten-plus from Amsterdam, coming together to play big pieces by members of the ensemble, and to play in small, improvising combinations. Over and over he chants simple lines like "Everyone is all alone," "I'm lost at sea" or "I'm not here.Doek Meets Tri-Centric: what a great idea. (The album's title refers to the first human clone.) Yorke's lyrics deepen the alienation, but in an elemental way. Now he has realized his own worst nightmare by turning himself into a singing cyborg. Years ago he began singing about the encroachment of technology and the loss of the self. For Yorke, the approach represents something of a self-fulfilling prophecy. In "How to Disappear Completely," his synthetically enhanced voice mimics the guttural mutter of Tibetan chants. "In Limbo" drowns his singing in the mix. It's spread thinly over the instruments like a strange condiment. Often his voice isn't distinct from the music at all. The group coaxes just as many sounds from Thom Yorke's vocals. In "The National Anthem," horns honk out a symphonic traffic jam. In the title track, the percussion sounds like knuckles lightly rapping on a door. And Radiohead makes equal use of harshness and smoothness. Texture has as much to do with these sounds as tone. In "Motion Picture Soundtrack" and "Treefingers," the instruments ripple like wind-swept water. Its fluffy white tones undulate angelically. The opening track, "Everything in Its Right Place," sounds like what clouds look like. But where U2 found distinction in murk, Radiohead makes each instrument glisten. "Kid A" represents the most radical rethink of the way a rock band can sound since Eno and Daniel Lanois crafted U2's sonic vortex in the '80s. Kraftwerk's skill at turning music into architecture also comes to mind. Other passages may draw on the work of Philip Glass - not its repetitiousness, but its clarity. "Kid A" finds equal nuance in quiet sounds. Eno's ambient music provides another touchstone. Radiohead's numbers also mutate as they go, with instruments changing their sound and their place in the mix. The way early Pink Floyd and King Crimson structured their songs may have been influential. So what precisely about the album's sound can be explained? It is easier, and fairer, to compare "Kid A" with similar approaches to music rather than any specific set of sounds. The only connection to the group's previous albums lies in its ongoing mandate to innovate.
" Not only does it sound nothing like anything the group has done before, it sounds nothing like anything anyone has done before.